Unforgiven
by Tara1189
Summary: "It doesn't matter what you say you've done for me. In the end, you'll always choose him." Merlin tries - and fails - to save Morgana. Oneshot.


**Summary: **"It doesn't matter what you say you've done for me. In the end, you'll always choose him." Merlin tries - and fails - to save Morgana. Oneshot.

**Merlin pays Morgana a visit. The immediate aftermath of The Witch's Quickening and before The Fires of Idirsholis. Hints of Merlin/Morgana, who I'm still shipping like crazy, in spite of Season Three and the derailment of certain characters (shakes fist at Julian Jones et al)**

* * *

_I see nothing in your eyes, and the more I see the less I like  
Is __it over yet, in my head?  
I know nothing of your kind, and I won't reveal your evil mind  
Is it over yet? I can't win_

_So sacrifice yourself, and let me have what's left.  
I know that I can find the fire in your eyes.  
I'm going all the way, get away, please._

('Breath', Breaking Benjamin)

* * *

**~ UNFORGIVEN ~**

Somewhere between the fire and the mists, Morgana began to change. He couldn't define _when _or _how, _but the fire was definitely where he had glimpsed it first.

Her chamber went up in flames and the fire in her died.

She started at sudden noises. She stared absently through people when they spoke to her. She turned pale as death at executions, the tear-tracks glittering like icy crystals on her still cheeks. Yet no one seemed to notice. No one seemed to realise that inside she was crying out for help.

He had to do something. He rescued people. Even when they didn't realise it. Sometimes, he didn't always succeed - the memory of Freya was still a piercing agony, like cold steel sliding through his heart - but he could not stand by and do nothing. It didn't matter that Arthur was the golden-haired crusader and he was merely a skinny servant boy who could barely saddle a horse without causing some kind of calamity (as Arthur pointed out often enough). He had to try.

Opalescent moonlight shivered across the stone floor, slanting in ephemeral rays across his pacing figure that stepped in and out of the lengthening shadows. Agonised, caught in indecision.

He had been haunting the corridor outside her chambers for what seemed like hours. Arthur would kill him if he found out. Uther would _literally _kill him if he found out. Merlin shivered and watched the moon climbing high outside the widow and scuffed his boots on age-old dust. The sound was endlessly magnified, repeating off the archaic stone.

There was a light glowing beneath Morgana's door. She was just as awake, just as restless as he was. Unless it was sleep she feared.

What did she dream? What could possibly be so awful, so terrible that it had reduced her to this? To contemplate her _willingly _betraying them?

Merlin felt pain just thinking about it.

Perhaps it wasn't the dreams. Perhaps it was the living in constant fear. He knew that fear, had touched it himself too many times. There were times he could almost forget. Then something like Aredian would happen, and then the terror would return. This time it had been the crystal. But he didn't want to think about the crystal.

He raised his trembling hand into a fist and knocked on her door. The echo seemed to reverberate, impossibly loud, shuddering down his outstretched arm. Merlin glanced anxiously down the long corridor. Oh, what if he was discovered here? He could not stop shaking and it was not from cold.

But then slowly - slowly - the door opened. And there she was.

She was so beautiful it almost hurt to look at her. He was used to it, but at times - like now - he felt it with crippling force all over again _(falling). _Her gown the shade of dew-drenched grass. The same lambent green as her eyes. Black hair rippling down her back like a siren's, like that of a drowning woman. Merlin wondered whether she had been drowning all this time, and he just hadn't been there to see it.

"Merlin?" A sigh. "It's late. Can it wait until morning?"

"It's important."

Without waiting for her permission, he stepped into the chamber, inhaling slowly through the tight band of nervousness in his chest. The air was velvet moonlight and white musk, breathed with lavender. Still and deceptively calm. A few lone candles encircled the room.

Ebony hair caught the silvered moonlight and reflected it back. Her skin was translucent, gossamer-pale. Almost ethereal in the velvet twilight. He should have been able to see right through her. The problem was, though, he never could. Her face, pale and closed, told him nothing. So different to when he had confronted her after the fire. Back then, she had been wild-eyed, terrified and distracted. Fragile, like glass and tears. Now she was… calm. Chillingly so. He felt it again, that distance between them. She had already started to change. Merlin desperately wished he did not have to say what it was that he had come to say.

But he couldn't back down now. She was staring at him, waiting. Perhaps she knew why he had come. Merlin drew a deep breath. _Say it._

"Morgana. I _know_."

Everything seemed to hold its breath. She turned even paler than usual, but stood her ground.

"What are you talking about?"

"It was you who stole the crystal of Neahtid."

Silence. The midnight mist deepened around them. The candles flickered.

Morgana was still. Merlin waited, his fingers clenched tightly in the material of his tunic. Sweat beaded his upper lip.

"That's ridiculous."

He felt pain, thick in his throat. Morgana had always been manipulative - often for a good cause - but she had never lied to him. He would have given so much to believe her in that moment.

"I saw you take it out the castle."

"Prove it," she flashed suddenly.

Merlin's heart thumped. Once. Twice. "I followed you to Alvarr's camp."

"You were following me? How dare -"

"Morgana." His voice was quiet.

Uncharacteristically, she fell silent. But her luminous green eyes flashed like liquid crystal, a searing blaze of a look that pierced his heart. Merlin could hear the pulse thumping in his ears. He looked down at their shadows, separated by the stretch of room. Was this how it would always be between them now? This seperation?

Yet he had to try and breach that distance. He could not stand by and do nothing. Not with Mordred still out there, somewhere. And Alvarr escaped, Alvarr gone. Had she loved him? The idea of Morgana in love was almost unthinkable, something strange and unsettling. It caused him to feel an ache he did not want to consider too closely, not after the lingering bruise on his heart that Freya had left in her passing. He sometimes wondered whether he had been in love with Freya. It had certainly hurt enough when he had lost her. But the unwilling part of him knew that whatever _connection _there was between him and Morgana went deeper, deeper than even she realised. But Morgana was too much her own person to sacrifice herself to _anyone_. At least, he has always thought so. But he had learned that he didn't know Morgana as well as he thought he did. And did she not love and hate with equal passion?

_And me_, he thought somberly. _Do you love or hate me, Morgana?_

Almost before he realised it, Merlin found himself moving across the chamber towards her, his throat burning with words he didn't know how to say.

"I'm not…" He stumbled and tried again. "I don't want to accuse you. I want to help you."

"Help me?" she echoed, elegant and aloof and scornful. "I don't need your help, Merlin."

He was surprised at how much her callous tone was able to wound him. The gauzy curtains around her bed fluttered in the faint breeze, a soft whisper of sound in the silence between them. His thoughts were slow, fogged as the veils of twilight that slanted through the chamber windows. He could hardly believe this was happening. She was so different from the Morgana he knew. And it hurt. When had she become so cold?

He remembered the first time he had seen her in fleeting glimpses behind that partition; the brilliant, laughing, vivid young woman who had talked lightly about dinners and jested with her maidservant. It seemed like a hundred years ago and a part of someone else's life. He used to come in to find her talking and laughing with Gwen.

That never happened anymore.

He wondered when she had lost her fire. Then he wondered why he hadn't been there to realise it.

Would it have changed things? Or would it have made no difference at all?

Of all of them, Morgana was the one who had been the most like him, the one who understood. Not Arthur, the champion. Not sweet and smiling Gwen. Both of them - her surrogate brother and maidservant - were arguably closer to her than he would ever be, yet _he _was the one she had confided in. He wondered if she regretted that now.

_You can trust me, Morgana. You know you can._

He could not keep the pleading from his voice. "I kept your secret. I helped you."

The candle was still burning on the table. She looked away from it as though its light hurt her eyes. He was hurting too, but it was a different kind of pain, of something lost that he could not quite define.

"Are you going to tell Uther?" Morgana asked softly.

"If I have to."

She sneered. They both knew it was an empty threat. "And who do you think he'll believe? Do you really think he'll take the word of a servant over his trusted ward of twenty years?"

He felt perspiration across his brow even though the night was cold. The inhalation of piercing air sliced his chest. Would she really turn on him? Was that what he had feared all this time? Was that why he had held back? But this was_ Morgana. They_ had fought side by side, laughed together, confided in one another, risked their lives for one another. But the look in her eyes was suddenly cruel beneath the careful guardedness. He knew too much, Merlin realised. She would never trust him again.

Her face was still, pale and beautiful as polished marble in the moonlight. Sometimes - just sometimes - she frightened him a little. For a wavering instant, her devastatingly familiar face became that of a stranger; magnificent and ruthless and terrible.

_You watched her plot to kill Uther. You know what she is capable of._

Fear snaked down his spine.

"You've defied him before," he pointed out falteringly.

"And he's always forgiven me."

"Because he _loves _you!" Merlin insisted. How could she not understand this? Morgana was one of the only two people in this world that Uther _did _truly care about, who brought out the the last vestiges of humanity in him.

He swallowed painfully. Something was stinging behind his eyes. Her slender figure blurred before his gaze, luminous and untouchable.

"Uther loves no one but himself."

"He cares for you."

"Uther has locked me up, held me in chains, killed the people who are like me - is that your definition of _love_?"

"Then what about Arthur? If anything happened to the king… it would destroy him."

Morgana looked away, her mouth pressed into a tight, thin line. Perhaps he had only imagined that glimpse of quivering fragility that passed across her porcelain features. This all seemed so unreal.

Morgana had always been the strongest of them all. She was the one who defied Uther, never backed down from her convictions. Now all that passion and fervour had been warped and twisted, turned to fear and resentment.

Merlin stared at her. "How did you become so full of hate?"

"Don't think to lecture me, Merlin. You don't know what it's like. Gaius drugging me with potions that never work, dismissing me like a child…"

"And Arthur?"

At last. Regret. "I thought I could trust you, Merlin."

"You _can,_" he insisted._ "_I want you to."

She looked at him with a peculiar awareness. Resignation, not anger, in the lucid eyes that searched his intently. Then she sighed, almost sadly. "It doesn't matter what you say you've done for me. In the end, you'll always choose him."

His heart fell. He could not endure the reproach in her voice. For a treacherous second, doubt clutched at him. Was he on the wrong side?

No. He was on _Arthur's_ side. But still… he couldn't escape the feeling that this was somehow all his fault. _You knew, _an inner voice whispered accusingly. _You knew what she was going through._

She had needed him, and he hadn't been there. Too preoccupied with Arthur and Gwen, with Freya, with Gaius after the Witchfinder. Everyone… except Morgana. She had been vulnerable, alone and scared.

And he had abandoned her.

She turned away. Her crystal earrings flashed with the movement. Merlin caught her wrist.

"Morgana -" _Please, _he almost said.

Her skin was like ice. It burned his hands. He was aware, distantly, of some boundary being crossed - _the king would have your head - _but pushed it aside. He had always followed her, had never been able to stay away. A part of him realised that he never would and he didn't even want to fight it any more. He tried to imagine Morgana disappearing to a place where he could not (would not) follow and it was something he could not comprehend.

He had been prepared to abandon his life, his destiny, to follow Freya to a beautiful unknown haven of lakes and mountains. If he followed Morgana, he sensed it would not be lakes and mountains that awaited him, but a fall through mist and endless darkness. It seemed an abyss had opened before him, and whatever he did, he was doomed. Camelot was doomed. He had seen it.

It terrified him. The moment he had touched the crystal, he had felt its power, the echo of thousands of years, of ages old, and of all that was to come. The glass shimmering, rippling in his hands that were suddenly cold as ice, the impenetrable crystal darkness turning red, the colour of fire, of endlessly running blood -

He had tried to wrench himself away, his mind _screaming, _his body jerking as though in rigor mortis while the images _sliced _through his brain_ -_

Quickened breathing cut through the cold air, bringing him back to the present. Morgana, so close, so far away. Colour flooded her icy cheeks. She was blazing, wild and defiant, but he welcomed it, welcomed it, because it thawed the frost. Her eyes were no longer distant but flared with a hot, emerald light, fierce enough to consume him.

Merlin's fingers strayed over her wrist. She didn't know what he had done, who he was. That he was frightened by the things he did, the things he _might _do. No, to her he was just a servant who lurked in corridors and knew more than was good for him and always happened to be around when Camelot was in some kind of trouble. But he had done things. Killed people. Destroyed sorcerers. He had called upon the forces of light and dark, stood under the elements as he battled Nimueh. He had felt Sigan's power coursing through his blood like black wildfire. He remembered that feeling too well. How it had burned, glowed, seared, twisting round his bones and muscles, melting him down and reforging him from a magic rooted in darkness. For seconds, he had held the power to destroy the world. The fact that he had somehow had the strength to overcome such power was perhaps the most frightening thing of all.

And she didn't know.

His fingertips slid across cold metal that bit into his skin. A bracelet, one he had never noticed her wearing before... But then she moved her arm and he felt nothing but the sweep of heavy brocade. His eyes absently traced the filigree of silver along her sleeve. The black satin of her hair fell across her face (_like Freya's, _he thought, fleetingly_)_ but this was Morgana, whom he knew, really knew. Or thought he did. Once. He looked down into her face. He was a lot taller than her; he often forget that.

"You don't understand -" Merlin didn't even know what he was saying, but the compulsion, the _need _to break through those icy barriers she had erected around her heart overrode all else - madness, reason -

Her elegant wrist looked so small enclosed within his long, pale fingers. He could feel the shuddering tension in her body, so close to his, long black hair falling wildly over her shoulders. Morgana, fire cloaked in ice, passionate yet aloof, too beautiful to be real.

"I know how you must be feeling." His voice was faint.

That lilting, fractured laugh was somehow _horrible _in contrast to the hollow despair in her voice. "I very much doubt that."

"I do. You just… need to trust me."

"I should never have told you anything. You don't know. But these people - they're _like _me."

"You mean people like Mordred?" The words were uttered before he could stop himself.

She snatched her hand away from his, and something inside him ached at the loss of her. A whirl of diaphanous material and she had retreated across the moon-drenched chamber.

"Why can't you trust me, Merlin?" Her voice was accusing. "You did before."

"This isn't like the last time. These aren't Druids, Morgana! They're _dangerous_."

"And Uther isn't?"

_Not as dangerous as Mordred. _

He had tried to ignore the warnings _(oh, so very hard). _The Great Dragon could not be infallible. He refused to believe it. Because if the Dragon was right about Mordred, then he was right about Morgana, and that he could not, _would _not believe -

_United in evil, _an inner voice reminded him_. _But Merlin pushed that thought away.

Is that what it would come to? If she had to choose between him and Mordred, Merlin was no longer so sure that she would choose him. Chill fear enveloped him. He had to warn her, to make her _understand -_

"The Druid boy. I don't trust him."

"He's a _child_. You saw what Uther would have done to him."

"Maybe… maybe Uther was right." His hands were shaking shaking like his voice.

He had never thought Morgana would look at him like that. "So you would see all people with magic executed now?"

"No! Trust me, that's the last thing I want. If you knew -"

This was it. The one last thing. He had gotten so used to having this secret buried deep inside him. He could feel it on the tips of his beating heart, seeking release -

Morgana looked intently at him, and he saw something falter. For a moment - just a moment - her gaze melted into his and time became meaningless. It was almost the Morgana of old that spoke with such tenderness and compassion. "What? Merlin, what is it?"

She came closer in a fleeting ripple of emerald silk. He forgot to breathe. _Her _hands on him now, her fingers like daggers of ice. Oh, how he ached to tell her. Tell _someone. _The moment trembled between them.

Then he shuddered, sighed. Misery thick in his throat.

"It doesn't matter."

Her face tilted up to his. Fear. Desperation. Then closer still, as though she meant to… but no, only a breathless whisper ghosting the unbreachable space between them. "Merlin… I just don't want to be scared anymore."

_Neither do I. _That was what he should have said. That was what he wanted to say. If her nightmares were anything like what he had glimpsed in the crystal, he could almost understand how she had been driven to this.

_I looked into the crystal and watched Camelot burn. So many dying. I saw the flames in the glass and could do nothing. And it's coming. I don't know what to do._

_Gaius can't help me. No one can._

He knew the loneliness. Better than she realised. Better than anyone.

"You know I'm here," he said gently. "I always will be."

But even as he said the words, he knew it was already too late. Once, she would have smiled. Would have thanked him. Would have done _something._ But fear had come, and darkness had followed_. _She no longer wanted to be saved from herself.

Morgana had drawn away from him, her back turned as she looked out the frost-laced windows. Outside, the stars shimmered coldly. He felt frozen. When had they stopped trusting each other? Who had pulled away first?

He had done too much, or not enough. They should have been allied together, not breaking apart like this. After all, they both wanted the same thing. They were both outcasts, outsiders.

But it was too late for them both. Destiny was driving them irrevocably forward and he could no longer fight it.

The candles had burned down to their last dregs. There was nothing but a great emptiness in his chest now.

"Just… promise me you won't do anything." He didn't know what else to say.

She had her ivory hands pressed against her cheeks. Her marble face was cold and so terribly beautiful. Her eyes emerald ice. "I'll never forgive him," she whispered into her hands. "Never."

He made to leave, sore and sick at heart. Her voice halted him, and he turned back, half-hopefully.

"And Merlin…?"

He nodded grimly. "I won't say anything."

After all, he never did.


End file.
